Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Welcome, all you Barren Bitches (or is it Uterina Ballerinas?) and our one manpie, Josh, to the question portion of the second tour of the Barren Bitches Book Club. This current leg of the book club is now closed (sorry!) so if you're reading this and want to join this online book club (or even just drop in for a single book to try it out), look at the post immediately above this one to see the voting process for the third book tour (each book is called a book tour since the club works by jumping from blog to blog).

These are the 22 questions from the 16 participants in the current book tour. Each participant needs to choose fivequestions off the list and answer them in a blog post. Everyone will post their entry (hold onto it and don't post it early!) on March 5th. I will send out an email on March 4th to remind you. On March 5th, I will post my own entry as well as the main list. Everyone can jump from blog to blog, reading each other's responses and commenting in turn. By the end of the week, people should have at least 16 comments from the 16 participants as well as any other random people who have seen the movie or read the book and have something to add to the discussion.

The List of Questions...

1. Though there are interesting female characters in the forefront of the novel, the cast of thousands of infertile women in the background are portrayed as crazy, desperate, and delusional. Did you feel P.D. James captured the emotions of infertility or do you think she merely repeated the image presented in the general media--infertile women are desperate and single-minded and obsessed with babies and pregnancy?

2. Some of the most memorable passages for me were those that described how dolls and even kittens came to take the place of babies for people after Omega. In all of these scenes, it is women who are pushing dolls in their strollers or taking kittens to be christened. Why do you think P.D. James chose to only portray women in these scenes? How does this fit with your own experiences of how men and women cope with infertility insimilar or different ways?

3. One of the story's responses to mass infertility was that couples stopped having sex since there didn't seem to be any point in it. How has IF affected your sex life with your partner? Did you have different experiences at different times along the way?

4. Do you think this was based on James' own experiences with infertility? Also, what did you think of the fact that Julian was a religious person and became pregnant. Is religion her solution, as it were, to infertility? Which is probably two questions...

5. In Chapter 7, Jasper Palmer-Smith says to Theo within a tyrade about society, "Now, for the rest of our lives, we're going to be spared the intrusive barbariam of the young, their noise, their pounding, repetitive, computer-produced so-called music, their violence, their egotism disguised as idealism. My God, we might even succeed in getting rid of Christmas, the annual celebration of parental guilt and juvenile greed."How do you feel about this statement? Do you agree in certain respects with it (and the rest of his statements, not quoted here)? Do you think this has become a true generalization of the youth in America today? If you have children now, how do you plan to raise your children so that this statement does not pertain to them? If you do not yet have children, how would you parent your children so that this description does not fit them?

6. Would you be able to go through all that Julian went through in order to have her baby in peace and safety?

7. Which male character in the book would you choose to repopulate Britain, if you chose the father of the alpha baby and why? And if you could widen the pool to include anyone in the world, which man would you choose and why?

8. What do you think is the significance of the fact that the two people who are finally able to conceive are both considered "flawed?" (Luke had epilepsy and Julian had a deformed hand)

9. What are your thoughts on the scene with the lady pushing her pretend child or doll? What do you think about the response of the people who react to her?

10. As a global epidemic, infertility creates an environment of desperation and chaos. How do you find this global reaction similar to your own personal reaction to infertily?

11. In describing the world's "universal bereavement" over it's lack of children, the narrator tells us, "Only on tape and records to we now hear the voices of children, only on film or on television programmes do we see the bright, moving images of the young. Some find them unbearable to watch but most feed on them as they might a drug." How is this like your life dealing with infertility? How do you cope when you are confronted with images or reminders that are painful to you?

12. In speaking of Theo's preparation to attend the Quietus, the author says, "It had been his habit all his life to devise small pleasures as palliatives to unpleasant duties." Do you have any habits or coping mechanisms that have a soothing effect on days that you expect to be unpleasant?

13. Once Rolf discovers the truth about his child, in his anguish, he rubs his skin raw against the bark of a tree. Do you think he is mourning his wife's adulturous affair or his new-found knowledge of his own infertility (since he thought he had impregnanted his wife)?

14. If you were living in this time period and were given the ability to become pregnant but knew you would be the only person to do so, would you have that child knowing that they would be completely alone in an empty world for the last twenty-odd years of their life?

15. Some parts of the book were written in first-person narrator and other parts were written as third-person omniscient. Did this make the book more or less compelling? How did this change in narration style impact your enjoyment and/or understanding of the book?

16. One of the reason's I suggested this book to Mel was because of a very thoughtful article in the NY Times by A.O. Scott comparing the film and the novel versions of Children of Men. Scott closes the article with a quotation by James speaking to the differences between what she normally writes -- detective novels -- and the world she created for Children.... She says, "The detective novel affirms our belief in a rational universe because, at the end, the mystery is solved. In Children of Men there is no such comforting resolution." The conclusion she leads us to, of course, is that the universe is not nearly so rational, which I thought very aptly describes the world of IF. At the end of the novel, we really don't know what will happen next -- will they find a cure for the world-wide infertility crisis? Will totalitarian rule come to an end in England? Will Theo wield power more wisely than Xan did or will he fall victim to the same peril he saw in Rolf? The haze of uncertainty resonates as it does with parenting-after-infertility because it's not all happily-ever-after when the wished-for child is born. Does anyone else identify with that? What does it take to deliver ourselves out from our own dystopias?

17. James' book makes much of the role of history--what should be (and so, is) kept and what should be discarded. These concerns seem a question never far from the handling of infertility and loss--how we reckon with our bodies' past failures, what we carry of that into our daily lives, and what we choose, instead, to put away. James' character Theodore writes in his diary of the "half-demented women" who fawn over dolls as replacement children in this invented, infertile world, but in our real world, infertiles are often cast as desparate, insane, ready to look madly for any replacement for a child. How, then, do we make known an "appropriate" history, of our hopes and failures and losses as we struggle to make a child when the body--and seemingly, at times, whole world won't allow it? How do we keep more than we lose, keep more than we hide, deeply, away?

18. For those that are naturally ambitious (in other words, a type-A personality), do you think it is realistic to fall into apathy or ennui so easily if there are no future generations?

19. In the book, there is a passage (Chapter 16, p 116) in which Theo describes the majority of the population's attitude towards intercourse. With the decline of humanity's fertility, there is also a decline in the physical pleasure of intercourse. The State has to actively encourage pornography to get people to "enjoy" sex. In the novel Theo assumes that because people are freed from the act of trying to conceive, people should be "liberated" and more uninhibited, yet the very opposite happened. Sex becomes synonymous with comfort rather than physical pleasure-in fact, it's relayed that women associate sex with physical pain rather than pleasure. As infertiles, the very act of intercourse suddenly and irreversibly has a different meaning for us-especially those of us who have been raised in religious faiths which stress that sex is for the main purpose of conceiving children. So, here's my question.........how has infertility affected sex for you? How has it affected your relationship with your spouse or partner? And, how have you worked through those feelings?

20. If the world that's described in the novel were to somehow become a reality, how would you live your life, knowing that there will be no future generations to carry humanity forward? What would you do differently, if at all?

21. Which aspects of the book are fair speculations about the future, and which seem too pessimistic?

22. The Omegas are portrayed as cruel, self-obsesssed and cold. Do you suppose that's a function of the way they were raised (as the last generation of children) or something inherent in them? Do you think that infertility has an effect on parenting?

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What is Stirrup Queens? It's a blog about infertility and pregnancy loss, an exploration of adoption and donor gametes, a bitch session about daily life and books, an outlet for stories and baking lessons written by a sustainable-living, kosher, Jewish, mother of twins conceived via fertility treatments who is still trying to add to her family.

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